Mr Obama's apologists have claimed throughout this election campaign that much of the reason for Obama's failure to achieve his vaunted 'change' has been resistance and obstruction in Congress to many of his economic and social measures.
If this is so, and the emptiness of the last four years is indeed due to a reassertion of the Congress over the presidency, then those who argued that 'much of Congress's power to manage the budget has been lost when the
welfare state expanded since "entitlements were institutionally detached
from Congress's ordinary legislative routine and rhythm. [and]"Another factor leading to less control over the budget was a keynesian belief that balanced budgets were unnecessary.', are now out-dated.
Either Obama has presided over a massive diminishing of the influence and power of the office he has been holding (which on Angels' take on the United States constitution would be a welcome development) or the wasting of all that 2008 hope and good will is a measure of the policy void of the last four years.
Insofar as Obama's re-election for the second half of the usual term of office for a United States president would lead to a further growth in the power of a resurgent Congress, it is to be welcomed; as is an economic policy that permits considerable free-riding, particularly by the Europeans while they repair their own economies. But it does seem a bit hard on all those voters who sought economic growth and social and cultural reconciliation. Those are not ever going to be delivered by a man like Obama, who acted in the first 4 years as if winning meant riding roughshod over principled opposition and well-founded misgiving in everything that he has manged to do.
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4 comments:
Indeed; the lesson the EU provides the USA with in spades - that Social Democracy is a disaster for those who live under it - has clearly not been learnt in the USA.
Good luck to them. They'll need it.
Had I been a voter last time I might have gambled on the unknown O rather than the all-too-well-known McCain.
But this time I'd have voted for the accomplished Romney rather than O. But then I'm not a GM pensioner revelling in the money that O stole from the GM bondholders and gave to me, or a thieving Wall St Titan whom O has failed to prosecute.
'.Social Democracy is a disaster for those who live under it -...'
It's called Social Democracy by those who subscribe to it and seek its imposition on the rest of us, Elby, but really it's Communism - eurocommunism it was called in Italy to distinguish it from the tooth and claw variety of realised socialism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the downing of the realised socialist regimes in the East there resulted a mistaken belief that these technically incompetent and politically, ethically bent mindsets were wholly discredited.
Not so: still embedded in the West in the public sector, its trade unions, its Third Sector, its big statism/high taxes governments, the eurocommunists have never been technically trashed and ideologically invalidated as were the regimes of the East.
Instead the incompetent economic practices of eurocommunism brought the 2008 collapse and then they brayed the failures of capitalism, denying the destruction of capitalist wealth-making brought about by eurocommunist interference from their swollen states.
The old central planners of the East are very old indeed, most are dead, but you should hear, eg, Kasimierz Laski on the technical impossibility of central planning and the horrors that it brings to those who suffer under it; and on the imperative to oppose the rise of the new planners and their attempts to substitute virtual markets for real ones as a solution to the failures of planning in economics. Or Janos Kornai on the failures of command economies.
We are still engaged in the overthrow of the West's communists; you don't get any of the lies and nonsense and waste we must put up with in Poland etc. We need another Reagan, another Thatcher updated to the 21st century.
'...But then I'm not...'
Dearieme, I'm so not the many categories that Obama boasts to represent it's difficult to know where to start: not black, not hispanic, not poor, not young (though I might argue that people pushing 30 are not young either) not one of the wimmin, not gay, not a car industry worker, not entitled to entitlements, not a warmongering drone despatcher,
And certainly not hopeful of his presidency.
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